


Six

by hrh726



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Infinity Gems, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Tags Are Hard, Team as Family, the avengers are the infinity stones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-02-10 15:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrh726/pseuds/hrh726
Summary: When Howard Stark held his son in his arms for the first time he saw the stars reflected back at him. He was lost for a moment, hurtling through the galaxy, anywhere, everywhere, at his fingertips, if only he were to will it so. There was a flash of blue light, eerily familiar, and when he shook his head to clear his suddenly spotty vision and looked down again, his son was asleep, eyes closed.In which the original six avengers are the infinity stones...





	1. Tony

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has been eating at my brain for the last two weeks so I figured why not?

1942

He spent a very long time in the quiet and the dark. He could sometimes tell there was someone nearby, but people weren’t really his thing, and so were only a minor distraction. There was another he knew, two others, that would have found the people interesting enough to stay in one place for so long, but he hadn’t seen either in such a long time. Searching, though he was very good at it, had lead to nothing but more loneliness, so he waited, in the dark, and away from the sky he so longed for. 

He waited until those who had taken it upon themselves to watch over his hiding space were gone and he was stolen for the use of a madman. And oh was he mad, the sort that festered and ate away from the inside out, aided by the man’s quest for power, for perfection. They were of little consequence, the people who stole and leached away his power. Temporarily unpleasant, but ultimately short-lived, as all things were. All things save for him. And the others, but it had been so long since he had been near any of them. And after what had happened, well, it was probably for the best for him to be alone. 

But then… 

Then. 

Then the madman stole him away from the burning facility and he felt a presence so familiar, and so long missed it was almost forgotten. But then they were away and the warm orange glow that suffused the very heart of the man left behind to burn was gone once again. 

He did not act quite so peacefully after that. He didn’t do anything rash or stupid, that was the domain of another, he waited and sure enough he was right, and the man who was oh so wonderfully familiar returned. But the man was distracted, eyes drawn to the source of the blue light filling the room. So when the madman made to use him as a weapon against the one he had searched for for so long, he had little choice but to fling the both of him across the galaxy, so that the man who glowed orange in his _soul_ would be safe. 

——————— 

When Howard Stark held his son in his arms for the first time, he looked into the newborn’s eyes—and wasn’t that odd, that his son was already awake, already aware—he saw the stars reflected back at him. He was lost for a moment, hurtling through the galaxy, anywhere, everywhere, at his fingertips, if only he were to will it so. There was a flash of blue light, eerily familiar, and when he shook his head to clear his suddenly spotty vision and looked down again, his son was asleep, eyes closed. He handed him off to the nurse, shaking his head when she asked if he wanted to come see him settled in the nursery.

Tony, his little Anthony. Something… There was something almost familiar… That’s right, how could he have forgotten, even in the face of his son’s birth. There was something he needed to find, something missing, something lost and alone in the cold and the dark just like—

Howard informed his wife he had an urgent meeting to attend and left the hospital intent on returning to his workshop. How he ended up there he would never know, he could never quite recall the trip from the hospital, and his car remained in the parking lot where he had left it, but he was too intent on his task, mind spinning, _soul_ utterly focused on what he need to do. _Find Steve Rogers._

_——————_  

Tony didn’t mind his father’s preoccupation with Captain America. He could almost understand looking at the photographs and film reels kept in the basement he technically wasn’t supposed to touch. There was something comforting about them though, when he couldn’t sleep, when Maria was too busy to sing to him anymore, when Jarvis was spending an occasional weekend at home. When his father brushed him away, shouted at him, raised his hand and— 

None of that mattered though, because he could curl up on the floor and watch the old black and white movies. Sometimes when he was really tired, when the stars sang to him and he hadn’t slept in days, the images looked like the warmest, most gentle shade of orange he could imagine, even though he knew if they were in color, it would be red, white, and blue.

During the day, when the stars were a little quieter, but his mind, his hands, were still restless, he would sneak into his father’s workshop for a different reason. He built things, things his father thought wouldn’t work, things that no one had dreamed of before. He built robots and artificial intelligence, he made weapons when his father and later Obadiah Stane insisted he do something actually useful. Mostly, mostly he designed space ships. Massive cities that could roam the stars for a millennia without stopping, small fast rockets that could go faster than light—he was never quite sure why people had so much trouble with that one. He made war ships, and ships that sailed with the power of sun light, and ships that could generate wormholes, and, and, and… 

It was always funny somehow, for reasons he didn’t know, that he had to craft methods of space travel. He was just designing though, could never make something that felt right enough to actually build. 

Then he took a trip to the deserts of Afghanistan. The sky was very clear at night. He dreamt about it for three months until one night he flew among them for a precious few minutes. Then the suit, which he would definitely be improving, fell out of the sky and to the ground, but it didn’t taste like failure, it didn’t dampen the urge to reach the stars. That longing had been honed, finally given direction. 

“Jarvis,” he called when he finally returned to his workshop. “Start a new project file, keep it on a private server. I don’t want anyone getting their hands on this. Call it… Project Infinity.” 


	2. Steve

Erskine looked at him oddly sometimes, almost squinting like he was trying to see something he just couldn’t make out. Whatever he was looking for he never told Steve, and he still chose him for project rebirth. Steve wanted to ask, tried to ask, but something always stopped him, and then… Then Erskine was dead, shot by a Hydra infiltrator who killed himself with a cyanide capsule before Steve could shake him and demand _why._ Why had he killed Erskine, who Steve believed was a good man no matter what he might have done for Germany. 

The one thing the scientists couldn’t quite figure out after he had been shuffled back into a lab and run through more tests than all of his many many childhood trips to the doctor put together was why there had been an orange glow around him for a few minutes after the vita-rays. It had faded so quickly as to be invisible in the bright sunlight outside, so none of those people who saw him hurtling through the streets had seen. Maybe Erskine would have known, but no one got the chance to ask him. 

Anyway, it didn’t mater after a few days,  he was on the road, traveling from city to city, rehearsing, preforming. He felt ridiculous, like a circus monkey, but somehow he managed to charm everyone he talked to, convince even the most stingy to do their part, help where they could. And if that orange glow came back sometimes, when it felt like he was about to be laughed off the stage, when he had to talk to someone important, well, no one ever commented on it, and no one ever seemed to remember it later. 

Then he was finally where he wanted to be, but not in anywhere near the capacity he wanted to be. The troops were rough and haggard, booing and laughing as he fled from the stage despite the orange he could see tinging the edges of his vision. He tried not to think about it most of the time, but he knew it was doing something, making people more willing to listen to him. It could have been something to do with the serum, but any time he tried to convince himself of it it felt like a lie. 

Peggy revealed that the men who had been his latest audience were what was left of the 107th. Two hours later he was on a plane in enemy airspace, Howard Stark, who he didn’t really like even though some part of him seemed to see potential in him, was flirting with Peggy, or maybe just talking, he wasn’t really good at either. He liked Peggy, she was smart and fierce and beautiful, and for some strange reason she seemed to like him, but there was something in the way, something he couldn’t name. It just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. And, well, he didn’t have a lot of time to examine his feelings before he was plummeting through the air to find Bucky. 

“I thought you were smaller.” That was the first thing Bucky said to him, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry or both. He explains as best he can, skipping over some details, like the orange glow. 

They’re almost out, crossing the bridge so they can go down and out the other side, and red-skull is there and he has a case and he doesn’t know what’s in it but he can’t take his eyes off it. He almost goes over the edge in their brief fight because of it. But then red-skull and Zola are gone and with them the case and he can think again without that blue light washing suffusing his brain. 

Bucky pries the rest of the story out of him on the walk back. Erskine’s weird looks, the orange light, the convincing people to do things, even the blue light and whatever was in the case red-skull was carrying. Bucky huffs and rolls his eyes and says, “Always knew you were something else, now everyone knows I’m right.” 

Zola is on a train in the mountains. Three of them repel down, two of them get off dragging an unconscious Zola behind. Steve doesn’t know what happened, no really, he doesn’t. One second he was staring into Bucky’s face as he fell from the train, he swore he could _feel_ him getting farther away, and then there was nothing, and then everything exploded around him in a mess of yellow and red and _orange._  

When he comes to the train is stopped and everyone on it is unconscious except for him. The Hydra agents, except for Zola are dead and empty. He doesn’t know how but he can tell, they’re not just dead they’re _gone._  

He puts the place down in the ice. Red-skull is probably dead, Bucky is dead, Peggy and him just… can’t, his Mom is gone. The cube is gone. The Tesseract. It fell into the ocean. He doesn’t know why the last one is the one that seems the most painful as everything is encompassed by dark and cold. He falls asleep with it’s beautiful blue light still bright beneath his eyelids. 

————————

He wakes up in an unfamiliar room. There’s a baseball game on the radio, but that’s not right either. He went to that game. Him and Bucky. 

Bucky. 

A nurse comes in, but she’s dressed all wrong and she’s not a nurse. He can tell. He knows she’s only telling part of the truth when she tells him he’s back home. The New York part is right, but the home part isn’t. He can feel it.

He sits and waits, doesn’t answer any of her questions, nor the man they send in next who says he’s Agent Coulson. He’s telling the truth about that, but not much else. Then a man with an eye patch comes in and something in his is brought to attention. This man is dangerous, it says. Fury tells him it’s ben seventy years since he went into the ice and if that little voice in the back of his head hadn’t told him that it was true, that Fury wasn’t lying, he wouldn’t have believed it. 

They take him outside when he asks, to let him see everything that has changed. It’s not so much the city the differences to the city that surprised him, it’s all the people. He looks at them and he knows them. He doesn’t ask to go out again. He keeps to the small room they gave him and he reads the books and the information packets they give him. He learns how to use the new technology and they all seem surprised at how quickly he picks it up. 

He’s doing his own research, he doesn’t trust Shield or Fury well enough to just take what they give him at the full truth, when he finds it. Tony Stark. Howard’s son who he looks at and feels a familiar blue light pulling in the back of his head. He doesn’t know how long he stares at Tony’s face. He’s about to do something, ask to see him, sneak out and find him, but then Fury calls and they need his help. 

Someone has stolen the Tesseract. He laughs and looks back at the picture of Tony Stark smiling on his computer screen. When Fury asks why exactly that’s so funny all he can think to say is how they should have left it in the ocean. Fury grumbles something, which might have been something about his sanity and hangs up. 

He’s still smiling when Coulson comes to escort him to wherever Fury is. It seems he has a tesseract to find. Coulson looks a little concerned when he laughs again. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a chapter for Natasha and Bruce ready after this. I have plans through the 2012 Avengers stuff, and some vague ideas for something with Thanos... I'll probably put the next chapter up on Sunday.


	3. Natasha

Natasha was eight the first time she noticed it. Sometimes when the illusion of ballet would crack and begin to fall away, when she was hurt from training, or sick from some new experiment there would be a flicker of red at the edges of her vision. She thought it was blood the first time, she’d fallen and hit her head hard against a chair. Maybe she was bleeding into her eyes. 

For days after though everything had been fine. Someone had come and given her something for the pain and the nausea, had shone a light in her eye and told her she needed to rest and to be careful to not hit her head for awhile. She had gone to lessons and there was dancing and they let her sit and watch for most of it instead of working her even harder until she wouldn’t make that mistake again. 

It kept happening, that red flash, often enough that she started keeping notes where she could, disguised as something else, anything else. It was just for a few hours, sometimes a few days, one time it lasted a week, the world would shift and everything would be better. Not perfect, not nice, just a little better for a little while. That’s all she wanted after all. 

She destroyed her notes when she was fourteen. One of the other girls found them, had threatened to tell. Natasha knew nothing good could come of that. They would cut her apart to figure it out, whatever it was. 

She let herself be bullied and blackmailed into doing things for the older girl for three weeks before pain and anger and humiliation seemed to have taken up every spare second of her day. The red wasn’t just a flash at the edge of her vision then, it curled through her thoughts and out into the room and the next thing she knew the girl was gone like she’d never been. No one questioned it, no one seemed to notice. She very carefully asked a few questions, but no one knew who she was talking about. 

That was the first time she was afraid of whatever the red was, whatever this thing she could do was, whatever she was. It was far from the last time. 

———————

Her stomach feels like it’s going to turn itself inside out she’s so hungry. She hasn’t slept more than five hours in the last week. She thinks she might have been shot at some point, but she hurts all over and it’s hard to tell one pain from the other. 

But she’s free. And she thinks it just might be worth it. 

She’s been careful with using her abilities. Well, the strange red glowing kind at least. She doesn’t want to make it easier to track her down. She’s been on the run for almost two years now. And she has been. Running. The people after her would not let her live once they caught up with her. It has been miserable and chaotic and cold. Sometimes at night, worried the cold will creep in a smother her in the night, she thinks about going back if only for a warm place to sleep. But then day inevitably comes and she’s still breathing and she remembers that she decided she was done. Her ledger is red enough. 

She knows her freedom won’t last. 

The square is busy, it’s a popular tourist destination after all. It would be perfect for blending in if it wasn’t so open, if she couldn’t feel a little prickly on the back of her neck that meant someone was watching her. She knows she should leave, get up and put as many civilians between her and the bell tower that watches over the area, but something whispers in the back of her mind to wait. She wouldn’t normally trust instincts, who knows who put them there or why or when, but this one is a hiss of red which might just be the one thing that hasn’t betrayed her at some point. 

She waits. 

Fifteen minutes pass and she’s almost done with her coffee. She’s almost starting to relax, something she knows she can’t afford, when she catches the movement out of the corner of her eye. She can’t help it, the quick flash of hurt as the tac team slips into the crowd. She doesn’t know exactly who they are, but she knows it won’t be anything good for her. 

She has three guns, seven knifes, and a garrote hidden on her. It might be enough. She’s doesn’t really want to find out. 

It turns out she doesn’t have to. There is a flash of green and the three men closest to her are on the ground, each with an arrow in their chest. 

People are screaming and running everywhere. Whoever sent the team after her wasn’t taking any chances, there’s a lot of them. But then there’s another flash of green and she turns with a half-feral smile on her face. She knew going to Budapest was a good idea.

———————

She’s on assignment, interrogating some idiot thug who runs a smuggling ring when his phone rings. There’s a brief conversation before the phone is placed by her ear. Coulson’s voice come through. 

“Natasha, Barton’s been compromised.” 

Her vision flashes red. The man she was interrogating takes a nervous step backwards. “I’m gonna have to put you on hold.” 

———————

The deck of the helicarrier bustles with activity as everything is prepped for takeoff. It all flows around her, no one wanting to get in her way, even if she’s in their’s. The jet comes into view just as she settles into place, a study in calm even if her interaction with Dr. Banner had left her more shaken than she would have liked. He’s hiding in a lab somewhere, she hasn’t gone to see him since they got back. It wasn’t just the threat of the Hulk, though that would have been enough on its own, it was something about _him_. He was familiar. 

The jet touches down gently. She waits as it shuts down. She wants to talk to Coulson, see if there’s been any updates on Clint. She knows there hasn’t been, but she’s gotten used to him knowing where Clint is and when and how. She should probably get rid of that habit. She’s not going to. 

She has the first words she’s going to say to Captain Steve Rogers on the tip of her tongue as the door hatch swings down. It dies on her tongue as she catches sight of him. He’s attractive, by almost anyone’s standard, peak of human perfection and all that, but what catches her eye is the orange. He’s surrounded by orange light and a quick glance at Coulson reveals that he’s not seeing the same thing she is.

He spends two seconds staring at her with something like awe and more recognition than she’s comfortable with before the world seems to shift and everything is red before it’s back to normal and she’s said something about Coulson’s Captain America trading cards. She doesn’t catch his reply, ears still ringing slightly. 

“You might wanna come inside.” Is the first thing she says once the world has realigned itself around her. Steve of course walks to the edge of the deck, watching as the giant engines lift the whole carrier into the sky. She feels the inexplicable urge to join him, to just stare out at the sky. _It would be better at night_ , she thinks, and then, _Tony would like that_. She pulls away, attention diving after the thought. Where had that come from? 

She’s still trying to figure it out as she leads Steve inside to meet with Fury. Red prickles at the edges of her vision, and in the back of her mind. When she looks closely there’s a matching curls of orange next to the green that’s been there for awhile, the blue that’s the same color as Stark’s arc reactor, and the yellow that joined her last night. 

Something strange is going on, and maybe it’s the flicker of excitement that bounces around in her head, but she can’t quite bring herself to be concerned about it. There’s something building in the very energies of the universe and she can’t help but feel like something is _missing._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruce's chapter will be next, then we get into the actual events that take place in the Avengers. Tony and Steve meet, we'll get a short Clint chapter once he's no longer brain washed, Thor will show at some point, probably...  
> I hope to update again next Sunday, but I have finals next week so who knows.


	4. Bruce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out it's really easy to just not update a fic... I rewrote this chapter and I still don't really like it that much but whatever. I'm getting to the couple scenes I really wanted to write so there's that... Hopefully the chapter will start getting a little longer too.

 

Bruce Banner knew he wasn’t quite right. He’d known it since he was a kid. His brain just didn’t work the same as everyone else’s. To start with he had a nearly photographic memory. He learned quickly too, like scarily quickly. Eventually, after he’d gotten his first phd people started bringing him projects or problems and asking for advice. Bruce wasn’t that kind of doctor, but give him a couple days and he could help you with whatever you needed, give him a month and he’d have another phd to add to his ever growing collection. 

The one thing he didn’t always get were people. Sure he had a doctorate in psychology, which had been alarmingly simple. The cognitive side of things just made sense, it was the messy things, the sentimental emotional side of things that he could never quite grasp. Maybe that was why it had taken him so long to realize something was off about General Ross. At that point it had been too late. 

He’d created a monster. His work, which had consumed him for as long as he could remember had crashed into the real world in a very literal sort of way. To say he was shaken was an understatement, he ran as soon as he could to the farthest, most uninhabited place he could find. He spent three months essentially living in the wilderness a few hours walk from a tiny village hoping that maybe the local predators would decide he’d make a nice snack one night. None of them did, they all stayed well away from him, could sense the beast even if other people couldn’t. He didn’t blame them, he’d do the same if he could. 

After three months without anything to do he’d started to go a little crazy, well, a little more crazy. He thought he might have solved several previously unsolvable puzzles and maybe figured out a couple secrets of the universe, but he’d need a lab to find out for sure. 

It was when his vision started to go yellow and it seemed the very fabric of space-time was whispering secrets to him that he decided he might need to reintegrate himself into society in some capacity. He was just wandering at first, trying to blend in, when he discovered he could help, at least a little, put his medical degrees to use for once. He spent almost a year wandering, helping were he could. 

He hadn’t had an incident since the other guy broke Harlem. After all, if there was anything he could master it was his own thoughts, it wasn’t hard to keep his anger shoved down far away where it couldn’t cause any trouble. It would be awhile before he came to some sort of agreement with the Hulk, but first there was a house in Calcutta and a shimmer of red. 

———————

He followed the little girl to the edge of town, not finding himself too surprised when she vanished out the back window. There’s movement in the corner of his eyes and he turns only to stop short his vision filled with a familiar red that curls around a woman who stepped out of the shadows. 

He’s blindsided by it, almost falls over his brain is spinning so fast and there’s not enough capacity to think about this too familiar woman he’s never met and pay attention to standing at the same time. If she’s as surprised as he is she doesn’t show it. 

“Dr. Banner, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress you’ve picked a hell of a place to settle.” She’s got some sort of game here. She knows who he is for one, must know about the other guy too. 

“Who are you?” He knows there’s supposed to be a script here, where they dance around the issue, but he’s getting some yellow flashes in the corners of his eyes and if that’s some sort of new sign that the other guy is about to make an appearance he’d rather not find out. 

“Natasha Romanov. Shield sent me. We need your help.” Her voice is smooth and soft, her movements careful and measured, choreographed, like a dance. 

There’s a flash of red and an image of ballet shoes and little girls spinning in circles one of them with red hair, before the world snaps back to the hut. They’ve both taken few steps away from the other. Romanov is eying him with something like fear in her eyes, and he’s gritting his teeth and fighting not to clench his hands into fists. 

“What was that. What did you just do?” Romanov moves in an instant, putting the table and also a gun between them. 

“What did I just do? That wasn’t me, unless the other guy’s developed some sort of telepathy.” He says, but she’s hardly listening to him, one hand going to her ear. “Wait!” She stares at him, hand hovering over her earpiece. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone but if you do this I’m not going to get a choice.” 

She seems to reset then, in the blink of an eye her entire posture shifts. She lowers her hand, and the white knuckle grip on the gun loosens slightly. 

“Why don’t you tell me why you came here, and we can figure this out later. I don’t think you would have come unless it was important.” He approached the table slowly, hands up slightly, keeping them above the table as he sits. She eyes him for a moment and then sits across from him pulling out a phone. 

“It’s called the tesseract. We want your help to find it.” 

———————

Bruce isn’t quite sure what to make of this situation. Of Shield and Director Fury, who he hadn’t actually talked to yet, or of Natasha Romanov who was blindingly, achingly familiar, even though he knew for a fact that he’d never met her because he didn’t forget anything. She felt like a long lost sibling, at least what he imagined that would feel like. 

They’d put him in a lab with some equipment and a couple of the people they had working on it already. It wasn’t a particularly hard problem, not when he was back in his element, with someone asking him to solve a problem. 

Natasha came to visit. She didn’t talk much, asked about their progress, but with her came that flicking of red at the edges of him vision and maybe he had to consider that it wasn’t just a hallucination at this point. Or maybe at some point in the future, he was a little busy at that exact second as the monitors flashed to indicate they’d found Loki. 

When Natasha had gone, left to collect Loki, he sat down and considered the problem. Not the Natasha Problem. The Loki Problem, or more accurately the Loki’s Staff Problem. Because he looked at thing and all he got was an error message flashing around in his head. Something was wrong here, someone was playing a game here, and it wasn’t Loki. 

He should run, his sense for when he should flee had been well honed in the last year, and everything in his was screaming at him to leave now. Everything except that little part that trusted Natasha Romanov like family. 

 


	5. Steve and Tony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had like no motivation to write recently, but I really like how this chapter turned out...

The heli-carrier had a constant quiet hum of background noise, the engines he supposed. It was impressive, he could give Fury that, but something about it was disconcerting, even with Natasha and Bruce, he wanted back on the ground, wanted to go back to New York. But that would have to wait, first there was Loki who had stolen the tesseract. 

“Cap, we’ve got a location.” Natasha said. He didn’t jump when she just suddenly appeared in the doorway. Some part of him had known she was going to be there. 

“Where?”

“Germany, Stuttgart. He’s at some fancy party.” She lead him from the room they had stashed him in down to the armory. 

“We got any idea why?” He had his reservations about his new uniform. It was very… Bright. It was nice to have the shield back though. 

“No, but given his history we don’t think he’s just there to mingle.” She handed him a tablet with what they had so far and they headed toward the hanger bay. Maps of the area, floor plans for the building he was in, names of guests that might pose a security risk if Loki brought them under his control like he had Barton and Selvig. 

He had ten whole minutes to study the information while the jet was prepped and during takeoff before, “So, Rogers, anything we should know about the cube?” Natasha asked. She was twisted around in the pilots seat with a playful smirk on her lips. 

“Fury and Coulson already asked that.” He kept his eyes on the tablet, something like anticipation humming in his chest. 

“I know. I also know you didn’t tell them much.” He expression took a more serious turn. “It could be important Steve, anything you know could be the difference between winning and losing here.” 

And she had a point. Of course she had a point. Maybe that’s why he told her the truth, or maybe it was something else, something about her. “Loki doesn’t have the real tesseract.” 

Natasha seemed to stutter for a moment, her whole being reseting in an instant. “What?” 

“Honestly, I don’t know how I know, they look the same, but there’s something different. Maybe I’m wrong, but there’s something missing and whatever’s left… It’s not stable, it’s not, it doesn’t have the same sort of power it did before.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes wishing the ever present orange glow he could see over everything would just go away. 

“You think it has enough juice for what Loki’s gonna do?” Her tone was flat, expression guarded. He didn’t fully trust what he was saying either. 

“I have no idea,” he paused, the memory of the few moments he’d spent in the Tesseracts presence flashing in his mind. “No, he doesn’t, and something bad’s going to happen because of it.” 

Natasha nodded, and if he had to assign an expression to her face it would be grim, or maybe she was just holding in laughter at how ridiculous the situation was. He knew he was, but two bouts of inappropriate uncontrollable laughter in as many hours was too many.

* * *

 

Everything had been going great. They’d finished construction on the tower, he’d just hooked it up to the arc reactor in the basement. It was the first large scale test of the tech, but everything was working perfectly so far. Pepper was happy, he had a couple days to tinker with the armor and work on some of his own projects. He’d had a great idea for a new solar sail he wanted to work on. 

Then Coulson broke into the tower. Couldn’t he have just a bit of a break? A couple hours? Twenty minutes even, he’d take twenty minutes, fifteen even. 

“You have homework to do.” Pepper said as she left with _Phil_. 

“Yeah, I’ll just…” He trailed off as he opened the files to see a blue cube staring back at him. “Why are people always taking me stuff?” He wasn’t sure why he said it, he also wasn’t sure why the idea of people trying to use this thing as a power source was so terrifying. 

“Jarvis, I want you in Shield’s systems. Everything they know about this, all of it. I want it.” 

“Right away, Sir. Shall I put in your usual coffee order as well?” 

“Yeah, that’d be great Jarvis, thanks.” He distractedly flicked through the files, stopping again when he saw the faces of the other prospective members of the team. 

Steve Rogers. Suddenly he was five years old again with a Captain America poster on his wall and a replica of the shield under his bed where his dad couldn’t find it. Well, it looked like he could call off that particular search. 

Later though, he had work to do. The suit needed checking over if he was going to be using it for this, and he needed to run some numbers to see just how bad it was going to be when the tesseract eventually exploded.

 

 

“Sir, SHIELD has the location of Loki. They’re sending a team to intercept.” JARVIS’s voice cut through the music that had been playing stilling his movement as he made some last adjustments to the Mark 7. 

“Well that’s going to end well. They sending anyone interesting? I should probably figure out where they’re hiding the heli-carrier, make an appearance.” He gave the panel he was fiddling with one last tap and it slid shut. 

“Sir, they’ve sent Captain Rogers and the Black Widow.” The edges of his vision blurred a little at that. Or, sort of blurred, maybe, there was a flicker of blue, maybe he should have slept at some point last night. 

“Prep the mark six, Jarvis. I’m gonna go lend the Captain and the Widow a hand.” He tapped his fingers across the arc reactor as Jarvis worked, the minutes seeming to last forever but the blue light was as soothing as it always had been.

He needed to be in Germany. As it was he probably wasn’t going to be fast enough to make it in time to do anything. What if something happened? What if Loki used his staff to take control of Natasha or Steve. Endless possibilities swirled in his mind. Bombs in the sand. Stale water. Yinsen. Being torn apart and turned towards the will of another. Flashes of light and echoes of screams. Ripples of energy emanating out across the universe. 

He couldn’t let that happen. Not again. 

The suit finished closing around him just as the cameras Jarvis had been monitoring started blinking, there was something happening in Germany. Loki was making his move. The blue flicker at the edge of his vision grew until it was all he could see. He looked out and saw the universe spread out before him. He could have gone anywhere, the Moon, the Andromeda galaxy, anywhere. There were five other flickers of color, swirls of light in the endlessness of creation. Four were on Earth. The yellow glow was closest, hovering out over the ocean, the orange and red were together, moving quickly, at least as far as Earth transportation went. The green was partially obscured from his view, dimmed and tucked away, turned to someone else’s will. The blue, him, was nowhere and everywhere at once. The last, the purple hovered at the edges of his awareness, almost completely hidden. He tried to move closer, to see more clearly, but a splitting headache snapped him back to himself and in that instant he nearly crashed into a building. 

“Jarvis!” He shouted. 

“Sir! Sir, you disappeared from the workshop. I couldn’t find you on any of my sensors.” 

“I’m fine Jarvis.” He pulled into a hovering position. “Where the hell am I?” He eyed the unfamiliar buildings that definitely weren’t the workshop he was just in, or even New York where he should have been. 

“Stuttgart, Germany.” 

“Did I black out? I don’t remember the flight here. What’s the situation with Loki, J?” His eyes flickered frantically over the hud, trying to take in all of the data that Jarvis was pulling up. 

“Approximately two minutes have passed since you vanished from the workshop. Sir, it appears you have teleported somehow.” Tony flicked his eyes causing most of the information to vanish. 

“So Loki’s still here?”

“Yes sir, he’s approximately two blocks North of your current position.” 

“Let’s go kick his ass.” 

* * *

 

Steve dropped to the ground blocking the ray of energy Loki had aimed towards the old man who had spoken against him. There was a familiar anger burning in his gut as he faced the mad god, who thought himself so above the souls that surrounded him. He wanted to shout at them all to run, tell them which streets would take them to safety. He couldn’t though, not before he dealt with Loki.

“You know, the last time I was in Germany, an saw a man standing above everyone else, we wound up disagreeing.” Loki responded, some quip meant to goad him into action no doubt, but Steve was to busy staring at the god. Something was wrong. There wasn’t anything in particular he could point to but something about him wasn’t right. Underneath it all, the showy armor and the Hitler speech there was a deep vain of rot at the center of his mind, running all the way down to his soul. 

He flung the shield anyway, he couldn’t let the civilians come to harm. 

Natasha dropped the jet out of the sky and called for Loki to surrender. It would have been a lot better if he had, Steve wouldn’t have had to fight him even though part of him wanted to help instead of harm. But he did what he had to, even if it was becoming apparent he might need some backup. 

Something blue and familiar and _wonderful_ burst into his awareness just before the jet’s speakers started blaring a song he didn’t know. A red metal suit of armor with a _blue_ light in the center of its chest shot out from between two buildings and had Loki on the ground before he could react. 

Steve’s vision flashed orange again and he thought of the light of the tesseract reflecting off of the bulkheads on the Valkyrie. That whisper in the back of his head as water filled the cockpit. 

“Cap.” The man in the suit said, something inextricably fond in the tone, even through the voice modulators, even though they’d never met before. 

“Stark.” Steve couldn’t help the grin that stretched across his face as he stared at the eye slots. 

“If you two are quite done.” Loki drawled casually, as though he hadn’t just surrendered to the enemy. There was something deep beneath his mask that was surprised though, surprised and… Alarmed. Scared. Like the rug had been pulled out from under his feet and he’d just hit the ground hard. 

“Shut up.” Steve said and roughly hauled him to his feet. Loki had a history of lies and manipulation according the Shield, he couldn’t let himself be distracted.

The jet landed in the middle of the square as the people who had been in the area slowly trickled back in to see what was happening. 

“Ms. Rushman, how strange seeing you here.” Tony said when Natasha opened the hatch at the back of the quin-jet. 

“Mr. Stark, somehow I’m not surprised to see you.” 

The face-plate of the armor flicked up and Steve was surprised to see the man grinning widely. “I here you have a certain gamma radiation specialist hidden away on your little flying clubhouse, so let’s hurry this up, there’s science waiting.” 

If Natasha was anyone else she would have rolled her eyes, as it was she just helped Steve secure Loki and then went back to the pilot’s seat. Steve found himself standing just starting at Tony and the blue light in the chest piece of the armor.

When Tony finally met his eyes with a smirk he looked away, checking on Loki only to find the god was also staring at Tony, eyes fixed on the blue light emanating from the chest piece. His eyes which were blue. He wasn’t sure why he did it, not entirely at least, some part of him seemed to know what it was doing, but between one moment and the next he had his hand on Loki’s forehead pushing so their gaze’s met. 

“Cap?” Tony asked the light clanking of the armor on the floor coming closer. “Everything okay?” 

“Steve?” Natasha’s voice joined Tony. 

“Yeah, just…” He trailed off. Something flickered into the back of his mind. He flinched back, pulling his hand away from Loki like it had been burned. “It’s fine. Let’s go.” 

“Alright,” Natasha said with a heavy dose of skepticism. “Brace for takeoff.” The jet took flight, soaring into the sky before vanishing into the cloudless night sky. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Next up is Steve, then Natasha.


End file.
